Drawpoint
“How do you mean?” Albert asked, sounding polite but puzzled.
“Illegal distributions of cash to your party,” Blancanales said, his tone equally polite. “Funds from overseas. Funds that violate campaign finance laws, just for starters, and that perhaps violate certain other laws intended to prevent the exchange of monies to and from terrorist groups.”
Albert was silent. Lyons pictured him gaping like a fish.
“You do not deny that your party receives significant funding from the Earth Action Front, do you?” Blancanales asked. Now his voice took on an edge.
“I…Well, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about…” Albert stammered.
“Justice Department,” Lyons heard Blancanales say. He pictured the soft-spoken Hispanic flashing the Justice shield Brognola had issued to each of the member of Able for occasions such as this. “And you, sir, are under arrest. We have a warrant and we’ll be searching the premises. This search extends to seizures of your computer equipment. If you’ll step away from the desk, sir…”
Albert muttered something Lyons could not hear.
Schwarz and Lyons both winced involuntarily as the earpieces they wore cut out in bursts of white noise.
“Gunshot!” Lyons was already jumping out of the SUV, his Colt Python in his fist. Schwarz was close behind him with the 93-R. They ran full-tilt for the WWUP building, dodging cars as they dashed across the street. Lyons ignored the honking and the shouts from irate drivers—though one particularly loud commuter shut up fast when he noticed the mammoth revolver in Lyons’s big hand.
The twin glass doors at the front of the WWUP building slapped open, banging in their frames. Two men leveled pistols from the doorway. One of them was dressed in a blue security guard’s uniform, while the other wore a button-down shirt and tie. Lyons shoved Schwarz away from him bodily as the electronics expert came abreast. Gunshots burned through the air between them.
“Pol!” Lyons shouted. “Pol, come in!” He triggered a single round. The 170-grain jacketed hollowpoint round dropped the security guard in his tracks, booming like thunder in the crisp morning air. Simultaneously, Schwarz triggered a 3-round burst from his 93-R. The suppressed weapon chattered, stitching the other shooter across the chest. He fell in a crumpled heap with his necktie flapping across his face.
“Go, go, go!” Lyons ordered. “Blancanales! Come in, damn it!”
R OSARIO B LANCANALES flashed the Justice shield. “Justice Department,” he said. As he informed Albert that the man was under arrest, threatening search and seizure of the computers in the office, he watched the man carefully for his reaction. This was the moment of truth. If he was innocent of any wrongdoing, or perhaps simply a white-collar criminal looking to finance his party with extralegal funds, he would plead ignorance or try to cut a deal. If the World Workers United Party was dirty, however—
Faster than Blancanales would have thought possible, the slim, well-dressed, middle-aged Albert wrenched open a desk drawer and yanked out a Smith & Wesson .38 snub-nose revolver. Blancanales threw himself backward behind a chair without thinking. The first shot punched a hole in the wall of the office, directly behind the spot where he’d been standing.
As he fell, Blancanales ripped his Beretta 92-F from its leather shoulder holster. Without aiming, he hosed the front of the desk and the air above it with withering gunfire. He didn’t expect to hit Albert; he only needed to drive the man back to foul any follow-up shots that might be coming.
A door slammed. Blancanales surged to his feet, the Beretta in a two-handed grip. Albert had fled through a second door in the rear of his office. Before the Able Team commando could give chase, however, he heard gunshots from the outer office, where he’d been kept waiting. These were answered by the boom of what could only be Lyons’s Python, something he’d heard countless times before. Too experienced to freeze up with indecision, Blancanales rushed forward, trusting his teammates to take care of their part of the operation. He pushed through the rear door, going low and fast, waiting for more gunshots. They did not come. His earbud was producing noises, but he ignored it for a moment, focusing on the immediate threat that Albert presented.
A fire door slammed. Blancanales hustled down the narrow corridor in which he found himself, the Beretta leading the way. He hit the crash bar on the fire door and plunged through.
“Pol!” Lyons voice came in his ear again. “Come in, damn it!”
“Albert has gone out the back,” he responded. “I’m in pursuit.”
“Two down in at the front door,” Lyons barked. “The secretary’s screaming her head off, but she’s not hit and she’s not a hostile.”
“Understood,” Blancanales said. He rounded the corner at the rear of the building, taking it wide, “cutting the pie” to give him an angle for a return shot if Albert was waiting. A car door slammed and an engine churned to life. Blancanales stuck his head out of the alleyway and saw Albert starting a late-model Taurus.
“Ironman!” he said. “He’s coming your way, out the front! Maroon Taurus!”
“On it!” Lyons responded.
Blancanales took aim and pumped the remainder of his Beretta’s clip into the rear of the Taurus. The car was already putting distance between them; his 9 mm rounds having no noticeable effect. Then the black Suburban bearing Lyons and Schwarz was roaring up to him, barely stopping. Blancanales threw himself into the back of the vehicle, narrowly avoiding catching his leg in the door as momentum slammed it shut.
Schwarz was already on his wireless phone, calling the Farm to arrange for a clean-up team to run interference with local authorities—and see to the bodies. Lyons drove with a white-knuckled grip, pursuing the Taurus through heavy traffic. The reinforced truck howled on its extra-heavy-duty tires. Blancanales imagined he could hear the overpowered engine sucking in gasoline as the armored SUV roared in response to Lyons’s foot on the accelerator. Schwarz was forced to hang on to the overhead handle to keep from sliding back and forth in his seat as the Suburban weaved and dodged. Blancanales smiled grimly and held on to the back seat.
“What happened in there?” Lyons asked, his eyes never leaving the traffic in front of them.
“You heard him,” Blancanales said. “I played the Justice card and he froze. When I talked about seizing and searching his computers, he went for the hardware. Who were the other two?”
“Security, I guess,” Lyons grunted. “Moved on us the second your boy opened fire. Must have made our stakeout. They were too quick to come at us, otherwise.”
“So they were already waiting for trouble,” Schwarz mused.
“But why would they just open fire? What’s to be gained?” Lyons asked. “The second we show up they start popping caps. Why?”
“Whatever the reason, this means Hal’s suspicions were well-grounded,” Blancanales replied.
“And a big, black Suburban parked on the street isn’t as subtle as we thought it was,” Schwarz said wryly.
“Gadgets, the clean-up team,” Lyons said, whipping the steering wheel hard left, then right. “They know to secure the computers?”
“Yes,” Schwarz said. “They’ll search the network and pull the drives for us. That’s if nobody activated some sort of sweep-and-clear doomsday program. We might come back to find their drives have eaten themselves.”
“Let’s hope not,” Lyons said. He came to a clear stretch of road and tromped the pedal to the floor. The Suburban growled and shot forward with renewed speed. “Got him now,” Lyons said.
Blancanales craned his neck, looking forward out the windshield from where he sat. The Suburban slowed for a moment and the distance between the two vehicles increased.
“Carl—” Schwarz said.
“Ironman, wait—” Blancanales protested.
Lyons slammed the pedal to the floor again. The Suburban rocketed forward like a battering ram. The bull bars mounted in front of the grille smashed into the rear of the Taurus, crumpling the trunk as the smaller vehicle shuddered beneath the impact. Lyons never let up, maneuvering the nose of the Suburban until it was scraping the rear quarter of the Taurus. Then he pitted the Taurus, slamming the sedan into the curb with tire-popping force. Maroon paint streaked the front fender of the Suburban. Lyons was out of the driver’s seat almost before the two vehicles stopped moving.
“Out of the car, out of the car!” Lyons shouted. “Hands where I can see them! Hands!” A dazed Timothy Albert staggered out of the Taurus. His airbag had not deployed, and his forehead was bloody. He had something in his left hand. His other arm was behind his back.
“Drop it!” Lyons yelled. The barrel of the Python never wavered. “Drop it, now! Get your right hand where I can see it!”
Albert glanced at the device in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. Something like recognition flashed across his face. Then his right hand came up. The Smith & Wesson’s short barrel lined up on Lyons’s chest.
The gunshot rang out. Crimson blossomed, soaking Albert’s chest. The .357 Magnum bullet from Lyons’s Python did its deadly work, dropping the politico-turned-gunman in a tangled heap. The body slumped against the creased rear fender of the Taurus and the .38 clattered to the pavement.
Lyons advanced, checking side to side and glancing to his rear as he kept the Python trained on Albert. When he was certain Timothy Albert wouldn’t be shooting at anyone ever again, he spared a look at Schwarz and then at Blancanales. “We clear?” he asked.
“Clear,” Schwarz replied said. He and Blancanales had taken up positions to form a triangle with Lyons around the damaged Taurus.
“Clear,” Blancanales stated.
“All right,” Lyons nodded. “Gadgets, grab a flare from the truck and direct traffic around us. We don’t need any more rubbernecking than we’re already getting.”
“On it.”
“Pol,” Lyons said. “Give me a hand here.” He knelt over the body. Blancanales, watchful for other threats and mindful of the traffic still streaming past, came to join him. The big former L.A. cop had picked up the device Blancanales had at first thought to be a phone. “Check it out,” he said. “That’s no phone. It’s not a PDA, either.”
“Strange,” Blancanales said, taking the device and turning it over in his hand. “It almost looks like a miniature satellite link.” The roughly square device had a tubular antenna running the length of its slim body, with a full miniature keyboard, a mike pickup and a tiny camera. It was much heavier than he would have thought to look at it. The device’s heft made Blancanales wonder just how much microelectronic black magic was hidden inside it.
“What do you suppose it does?” he asked.
“That’s Gadgets’s department,” Lyons said. “But I wanted you to get a look at it before he takes it.”
“True.” Blancanales laughed. “Once he’s got his mitts on it, we’ll never see it again.”
“Why do you think I sent him to direct traffic?” Lyons cracked a rare grin.
“I heard that,” Schwarz said over the earbud transceiver.
CHAPTER TWO
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
A bleary-eyed Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman wheeled himself into the War Room at Stony Man Farm, cradling an oversize stainless-steel insulated travel mug in the crook of one hairy arm. He positioned his wheelchair next to where Barbara Price already sat, checking files on her laptop as she glanced up at the large plasma wall screens to which the slim notebook computer was connected. Stony Man’s honey-blond mission controller looked up and raised an eyebrow at Kurtzman.
“Security blanket, Aaron?” she asked, nodding to the mug.
“Life support,” Kurtzman said evenly. He took a long drink from the mug, the smell of his extra-strong coffee reaching Price from where the bearded, barrel-chested cybernetics expert sat. “Want some?”
“No, thanks,” Price said, smiling. Kurtzman’s personal blend was legendary for its power. “I don’t want to burn a hole through my stomach.”
“I haven’t had any,” a disembodied voice said over the War Room’s speakers, “and I’m still working on an ulcer.”
Price tapped a key on the laptop. The harassed face of Hal Brognola appeared on one of the plasma wall screens. He was chewing an unlighted cigar and glanced repeatedly off camera to something that had to have been on his desk. The microphone on his end of the scrambled link picked up the sound of shuffling papers and then the tapping of computer keys. Brognola, as leader of the SOG, was one of only a handful of living human beings—apart from those operators working within Stony Man’s ranks—who knew that the ultracovert antiterrorist operation existed. When it came to the Farm, Brognola answered to the Man himself, the President of the United States. But while Stony Man was the President’s secret antiterror and security arm, it was Brognola’s baby first. The stress, the constant worry, the basic wear and tear of heading SOG and the Farm were evident in Brognola’s face, and had been for as long as Barbara Price had known him.
Price knew at a glance that Brognola was seated in his office on the Potomac, the gray-skies-and-white-marble Wonderland backdrop a stark contrast to the beauty of the Shenandoah National Park. The park ran along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Stony Man Farm—a real, working farm—was named for Stony Man Mountain, one of the highest peaks in the region and roughly eighty miles by helicopter from Washington. The natural beauty in which the base was located belied the brutal ugliness of the situations with which the Farm’s staff so often coped. From the look in Brognola’s eyes it was clear that this day would be no different.
“Good morning, Hal,” Price said. On the other end of the scrambled connection, Brognola managed a smile.
“Barb, Aaron,” Brognola said, nodding. Kurtzman grunted in reply. “Did you get what there was, Bear?”
Kurtzman swallowed and put the mug down on the conference table. “I’ve got Hunt and Carmen data-mining,” he said, “but that’s just to dot the eyes and cross the tees. I spent the night going through what they’ve pulled, organizing it and getting it uploaded to Barb for the brief.”
Price nodded. “Hunt” was Huntington Wethers, the eminently refined black man who was one-third of Kurtzman’s computer support team. Wethers had been a professor of cybernetics at Berkeley before Kurtzman recruited him. Carmen Delahunt, by contrast, was an old-line FBI agent until Brognola had gotten his hands on her. The vivacious redhead’s personality made her an interesting counterpoint to Wether’s quiet dignity. While Kurtzman hadn’t mentioned him, Price knew that Akira Tokaido, the youngest member of Stony Man’s team, was busy working on some hardware with one of the Stony Man team members. Of Japanese descent, Tokaido was never without an MP-3 player blasting heavy metal music into his much-abused eardrums. Price had no idea how he concentrated with that noise ringing in his brain, but he seemed to thrive on it.
“We almost ready?” Brognola asked.
“Bringing up Able now,” Price said. She tapped a few more keys. A second plasma screen came alive with the out-of-focus image of a beefy palm. Price raised an eyebrow again, then shook her head with a smile as the hand was withdrawn. The image resolved itself into that of a very irritated Carl Lyons, obviously staring down into a Web cam of some kind. Schwarz and Blancanales crowded in next to him, their heads almost touching as they verified they were present for the meeting. Lyons shrugged them off, leaving only parts of their shoulders and torsos in view as he glared down at the camera.
“This,” he said tersely, “is really annoying.”
“You’ll live,” Price said evenly. “Can you hear us and see us okay?”
Lyons grunted. “Yes.”
“Wideband scattering-noise projectors in place,” Schwarz said, his face not visible. Price nodded; this would thwart electronic eavesdropping on their location, including directional microphones.
The door to the War Room opened again. Several men entered. Price watched them take seats around the conference table and nod to the images of Brognola and Able Team in turn. The new arrivals were Phoenix Force, the second counterterrorist team run by the Farm, responsible primarily for international operations. The greater scope of their turf was reflected in the larger size of the team—five for Able’s three.
Slouching into his seat, nursing a can of Coke and appearing deceptively casual, was David McCarter, Phoenix Force’s leader. The lean, fox-faced Briton had always been something of a hothead, which had brought him into conflict with Brognola more than once. He had proved a capable leader, however, through countless missions with Phoenix. The former SAS operative smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. Price assumed he’d just finished one before the briefing.
Next to McCarter, making a show of waving away the fumes, was the stockier, more heavily muscled Rafael Encizo. The Cuban-born guerrilla expert was a much squatter, blockier man, but his appearance, Price knew, concealed catlike reflexes.
Demolitions expert Gary Manning, sat on the other side of McCarter, sipping what Price assumed was coffee.
Tall and graceful, Calvin James slipped into a chair next to Manning. The lanky black man, who’d grown up on Chicago’s South Side, was the team’s medic and former Navy SEAL who was also very talented with a knife.
Bringing up the rear was T. J. Hawkins. The youngest member of the team, Hawkins was a former Army Ranger. The Georgia-born southerner’s easy manner and lilting drawl concealed a keen mind and viciously fast fighting abilities.
“All accounted for, Hal,” Price said finally.
“All right,” Brognola said. “Let’s get started.” Price took this as her cue and pressed a button on her laptop, bringing up a map of India.
“Bloody hell,” McCarter muttered.
“Just under forty-eight hours ago,” Brognola said, ignoring McCarter, “an armed raid was staged on a mining facility in the Meghalaya hills, north of Bangladesh, not far from the West Khasi Hills district headquarters, Nongstoin. The facility is jointly owned by UVC Limited and the Indian government.”
“UVC?” Schwarz asked, his head still cut off on screen.
“Uranium-Vanadium Consortium, Limited,” Brognola said.
“I thought India was relatively uranium-poor,” Manning put in.
“Not anymore,” Brognola said. “I don’t yet have all the details, nor are they necessarily relevant, but UVC is using a new sonic-based technology to find and exploit previously untapped reserves of ore, including uranium. The deal they cut with the Indian government apparently stems to long before the ore was actually found in Meghalaya. Their surveyors gambled and construction began on an experimental laser enrichment plant well in advance of the actual mining operation.”
“So just how large-scale is this?”
“Large enough to make India a much bigger player in the nuclear club,” Brognola said. “The Indian government has long maintained a high level of secrecy regarding its nuclear power and weapons programs, but we all know they have nuclear weapons and have had them since the 1970s. A steady source of uranium ore and a steady production of enriched fuel will simply advance their program or programs, and significantly.”
“So the issue is the standoff with Pakistan?” James asked.
“No,” Brognola said. “That would almost be preferable. The issue is that the UVC facility in Meghalaya was relieved of several insulated drums of enriched, weapons-grade fuel. That itself is enough to get us involved. But that’s just the beginning of the problem.”
Price tapped a key on her notebook again. The image of a dark-skinned man appeared, a mugshot from an international criminal database. It was juxtaposed with a second image—that of the same man, eyes closed in death, lying on a slab in a morgue.
“This is Nilambar Chakraborty,” Brognola said.
“It was, you mean,” McCarter muttered.
Brognola spared McCarter a baleful gaze through his camera before continuing. “Chakraborty is a known member of the Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party, a terrorist group operating in Bangladesh. They’ve broadened their territory lately, moving farther and farther north into India and surrounding areas. The PBSP is a vicious, well-financed, anti-capitalist revolutionary group whose ideological origins stem from sympathy for the Chinese Communist movement. Their ultimate aims are vague, but coherent enough. They seek to bring about worldwide socialism, starting with their part of the world, through force of arms.”
“These blokes have been around for years,” McCarter put in. “Starting with opposition to the new Bangladeshi state. And last I knew, they spent most of their time and energy splintering off from one another to form different opposed sub-groups.”
“That was true until perhaps two years ago,” Brognola nodded. “The PBSP has since experienced a surge in growth, tied to global resurgence of various Communist and socialist groups.”
“The political pendulum is swinging around the world,” Encizo said sourly. “As it does, as people foolishly throw in with totalitarian ideologies, the fortunes of terrorist and agitator groups like these go up.”
Price watched Encizo thoughtfully. As a native Cuban he was naturally sensitive to the evil that communist governments could wreak.
The door of the War Room opened. Akira Tokaido entered quietly, carrying what appeared to be a personal data device, and took a seat.
“But wait,” Blancanales said off-camera, imitating a game-show host, “there’s more.”
“Indeed there is,” Brognola said. “Akira?”
“This,” Tokaido said, holding up the electronic device, “was recovered by a security guard who survived the attack on the UVC plant. The device was given to executives at Sugar Rapids Security, who forwarded it through channels to the U.S. Government almost immediately. We got word of and intercepted it before it could disappear into a Washington warehouse somewhere, crated up next to the Ark of the Covenant.”
“Chakraborty was carrying that device,” Brognola explained.
“And this,” Schwarz chimed in, holding up a PDA-size device of his own, “is an identical unit, recovered from the now deceased director of the Illinois chapter of the World Workers United Party.”
McCarter looked from the screen to the device in Tokaido’s hands, then back. “Bloody hell,” he said again.
Tokaido removed the earbud headphones attached to his MP-3 player. Heavy metal noise could be heard through the speakers, even from across the table. The young Asian blushed slightly and switched off the player. He pointed at the device recovered in India.
“This,” he said, “is a sanitized communicator. It has been manufactured with parts that are supposed to be untraceable. It carries no identifying markings, but all I had to do was play with it and look at its internals to understand what it is. It’s a Worldcom Transat Seever.”
“A knockoff, you mean?” Hawkins asked.
“No,” Tokaido said. “It is not a knockoff. It is a genuine WTS and uses the same satellite network and communications protocols. The only difference between this and a commercial WTS is the origins of the parts and the lack of serial numbers on them.”
“Does somebody want to tell me what a WTS is?” Lyons asked, sounding irritated.
“The WTS is the flagship product of Butler Telecommunications,” Barbara Price explained. “It’s the next generation of secure, scrambled satellite phone.”
“Like the units we carry?” James gestured with the secure phone he and all the Stony Man team members carried.
“Much more advanced,” Kurtzman said, “in terms of the bandwidth it can handle and the way the units interface with one another. Your phones connect with us at the Farm for security reasons, and we can transfer data, photos and so forth. The transmissions are coded and secure, yes, but most of that security stems from the fact that you’re communicating with the Farm and not other points of transfer. The Seevers produced by Butler Telecomm are bulky and awkward compared to your duty phones, but they give an agent in the field a means of communicating with any other similarly equipped agent, completely securely, anywhere in the world.”